Anya Adair researches medieval English literature, as well as pre-modern English law and legal culture. Her focus is Old English law and literature, but her research extends also to Old Norse and Anglo-Latin, medieval language interaction, book history and manuscript studies, poetry and poetics, digital humanities, and the history of the English language.
Anya holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale. At Melbourne, Yale and HKU, she has taught courses in interdisciplinary law and literature, legal history, medieval and early modern English literature, creative writing, the history of the English language, palaeography and codicology, and digital humanities.
The historical scope of Anya’s present research covers the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. It aims to unite more closely the fields of medieval law and medieval literature, and to provide insight into the intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of legal and literary production across the period. Her interest in legal and literary culture takes her work into the history of emotion, historical linguistics, religious writing, poetry, poetics and rhetoric, as well as palaeography, codicology, and the history of law. In all of these dimensions, Anya’s research is driven by a fascination with the minutiae of language, and the potential of its smallest detail to solve the puzzles of the past.
Old and Middle English literature; medieval English literature; law and literature; pre-modern English legal history; book history; manuscript studies; digital humanities.
A funded MPhil place is offered for a suitable candidate researching. Visit here for details.